The biggest merger of health-care providers in Muskegon's history is on track to be completed by April 1, according to officials at Hackley Hospital and Mercy General Health Partners.

Mercy General's parent corporation, Novi-based Trinity Health, plans to acquire all the assets and liabilities of Hackley Health, parent company of the financially struggling Hackley Hospital. The merger will result in a new nonprofit hospital corporation, owned by Trinity, that provides even better health care at less cost, according to hospital officials and an independent analyst.

Dozens of officials at Mercy General and Hackley Hospital have spent the past four months figuring out how to merge two large business operations that collectively employ 4,315 people, operate four hospitals, nursing homes, primary care networks and own about 40 buildings.

The process has involved reviewing financial records, appraising property values and searching for a name for the new organization.

"Oh my goodness, it's been very involved ... but we haven't found any roadblocks," said Roger Spoelman, chief executive officer of Mercy General, which owns hospitals on Sherman Boulevard and Oak Street.

Hackley Hospital CEO Gordon Mudler agreed, saying: "We haven't run into anything that would be a deal breaker."

No opposition to the merger has surfaced.

"I would say the merger is pretty much a done deal -- not 100 percent, but there's little chance of it not happening," said Lody Zwarensteyn, president of the Alliance for Health, an independent health-care assessment organization in Grand Rapids.

Even the unions representing nurses, maintenance workers and technical and support staff at the hospitals are supportive.

"The unions are committed to working together to make this as smooth a transition as possible," said Marge Faville, secretary-treasurer of SEIU Healthcare Michigan, which represents 700 employees at Hackley Hospital and more than 1,000 at Mercy General.

"Some of our members are concerned about being moved to different locations and there are always concerns about layoffs," Faville said. "But the hospitals haven't said there will be layoffs and our nurses will still have the same number of patients to take care of, whether those patients are at Hackley or Mercy."

Spoelman said the goal is to sign a legally binding merger agreement by April 1. Once the deal is done, he said transition teams that have been figuring out how to merge the health-care providers will dive into the process of combining business operations and moving some people, machinery and furniture.

"At the point you sign the deal, you really haven't done anything -- you still have two separate organizations," Mudler said. "At that point the real work starts."

Federal antitrust laws prevent officials from the two hospitals from discussing some financial details of their businesses before the merger is finalized. Completion of the deal will trigger a flurry of changes in the hospitals, some of which will play out over the next several years, officials said.

Spoelman said he expects there will be one main hospital in Muskegon by 2018, which likely would be the existing facility at Mercy General's Sherman Boulevard campus. He said Hackley Hospital's building on Clinton Street will remain open, though some surgical procedures and acute care could shift to Mercy General's hospital.

The merger is not expected to result in many layoffs, Spoelman said.

"Our intent is to grow, not get smaller," Spoelman said. "We're looking at expanding our services to the north, south and east."

Instead of laying off workers, Spoelman said he believes the hospitals can trim labor costs by not replacing employees who leave. Both hospitals have an annual employee turnover rate of about 14 percent, he said.

Zwarensteyn said the department managers and middle managers who oversee similar functions in both hospitals are most likely to lose their jobs when the hospitals merge. But, he added, Hackley and Mercy have run lean operations and are not likely to lay off many workers.

"They won't need two CEOs," he said. The 62-year-old Mudler is expected to retire once the merger is complete.

A decade after working on the merger of Butterworth and Blodgett hospitals in Grand Rapids (which resulted in the formation of Spectrum Health), Zwarensteyn said he sees only good things coming out of Mercy General and Hackley becoming one company.

"If they don't get super adventurous in the way of development (by building a massive new hospital), the future is real rosy," he said. "For Muskegon, this merger is very, very good news."